While the Russellville High School basketball team practices for an upcoming game and the baseball team gets ready for spring, a different sort of team is practicing in a social studies classroom.

That team won’t be practicing free throws or fielding baseballs — instead, they’ll be studying trivia over subjects ranging from the periodic table to Pulitzer Prize-winning authors.

The classroom belongs to Paul Gray, a history and geography teacher at the high school, and the teenagers practicing trivia belong to the Quiz Bowl team, a group of 19 students who represent the high school in competitions throughout the state.

Some may scoff at the idea of Quiz Bowl as a sport, but its demanding schedule says otherwise. The team travels regularly throughout the year to schools throughout the state, which makes for a grueling schedule.

“The season starts in September and ends in April,” said Gray, who is a co-advisor to the team. “A reporter a couple of years ago said, ‘That’s got to be the longest season in school.’ I had never thought of it that way, but I guess it is.”

If the travel schedule resembles that of athletics, then so does both the format of the competition and the strategy required to win it.

“I draw a lot of analogies with sports,” he said. “There’s four quarters, there’s strategy, you can call timeouts, there’s points. There are a lot of things that are just like sports.”

Different quarters have different formats, which require the teams to adjust their personnel accordingly. The third quarter, the most pivotal quarter in a match, allows a team to choose their own topic, so they’ll bring in three “specialists” that know that topic well. The fourth player will be a specialist in the category they anticipate the opposing team will select, as they will have a chance to answer the question if the opponent misses it.

By contrast, the first and fourth quarters contain mostly toss-up questions, which requires fast players with comprehensive knowledge.

The questions vary across a wide spectrum of knowledge — the first page of a list of match questions had answers ranging from The Social Network to Thomas Hobbes — but the players can expect to be asked several recycled questions per match. These reused questions, which Gray refers to as the canon, are studied diligently by the players.

“Our kids are trained,” Gray said. “If a question begins, ‘This author from Chicago,’ we’ve taught them already to buzz in. And the answer is Carl Sandburg,” he said.

The Quiz Bowl team is now in its third year since Gray helped re-establish it in 2009, after it had been defunct for nearly seven years. A parent approached Gray five years ago and urged him to restart the team. Gray considered it for a couple of years before deciding to be an advisor for it.

Gray, who was named Arkansas Teacher of the Year in 2008, is a trivia buff with a competitive streak, and he found a unique fusion of the two in the sport, which he co-advises with history teacher Brandon Cooper.

“It appeals to both of my sides: I’m very competitive, but I also like the academic portion of it,” Gray said.

While some might see the Quiz Bowl as divorced from academics in any important way — trivia does, after all, denote useless information — Gray has been surprised by the impact it has had on students’ learning methods.

“We did an exit survey with our players, and we were stunned by the answers,” he said. “They talked about it how it helped them to see the connections between the classes, and they started listening more in class because they thought it might help them in a game.”

Gray and Cooper have found quick success in their rejuvenation of the team. After finishing second to last in the regional tournament two years ago, they bounced back to finish third in the state last year. This year, they found a sponsor in Quizno’s — Gray joked at the appeal of the alliteration of “Quizno’s Quiz Bowl” — who provided them with t-shirts as well as meal discounts.

Consistency — and continuity — will be two large focus areas for Gray and Cooper in the coming years, as they look to build a Quiz Bowl program that establishes continuity from middle school all the way to twelfth grade.

“We have to make sure younger kids like Quiz Bowl and are learning a strong content base as they get older so they can be successful,” Cooper said. “We need it to be a continuous process.”

Gray cites the school district’s support — especially Laura Binz, the Gifted and Talented Coordinator for the district — as a major part of their success.

“[Laura] does so much to help us and makes sure the team has what it needs,” he said. “We’re very much supported by the school district. I don’t think other places get the kind of support we do.”